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Drakon wrote:I bought a cheap ebay famicom copy of gremlins 2 and it contains the sunsoft 5b chip. Would it be possible to convert this into japanese mr. gimmick with the audio wired up?

*edit*

Looking at the maskroms the prg maskrom of gremlins 2 has less pins haha d'oh. I also have a batman return of the joker, would it be easier desoldering the 5b and installing it in my return of the joker nes cart?

Yes,but the ex-sound maybe not include in the gremlins's sunsoft 5b

byemu wrote:Yes,but the ex-sound maybe not include in the gremlins's sunsoft 5b

Really? Oh well guess there's only one way to find out for sure.

byemu wrote:...the ex-sound maybe not include in the gremlins's sunsoft 5b

That seems unlikely to me. Having another version of the 5b without the expansion sound would be pretty bad practise... why would you want indistinguishable chip variants around?

I'd say it's more likely that the 5a has the expansion sound than there is a 5b variant that doesn't. This is a question several people have posed, but nobody seems to have offered an authoritative answer on these forums yet. I wouldn't presume that it does, but it remains an open question. (My money's on no, but I think it's chances are better than there being a different 5b with no sound.)

Drakon wrote:

byemu wrote:Yes,but the ex-sound maybe not include in the gremlins's sunsoft 5b

Really? Oh well guess there's only one way to find out for sure.

I'm not sure

rainwarrior wrote:This is a question several people have posed, but nobody seems to have offered an authoritative answer on these forums yet.

The question being "what exactly are the differences between the FME7, 5A, and 5B"?

I wish that byemu would post his findings in his native tongue, even though I won't be able to understand it.

tepples wrote:グレムリン Gremlin in that logo looks dangerously close to グレムリソ Gremliso. In katakana, where does ン n become ソ so and ソ so become リ ri?

That's exactly why I never really wanted to learn japanese. I mean learning two alphabets of 48 caracters is not too bad, but the fact some of them are alike is really confusing. There is also the mini-tsu characters which should not be pronounced "tsu", and so on.
Also even if you master perfectly kanas, you'll only be able to read text in old video games and kid's stuff because everything else is written with kanjis and you should study dozen of thousands of hours to learn all of them.

Like a lot of custom japanese chips there's a lot of questions without answers. The only real way to find out is to convert the cart to gimmick, wire up the audio circuit, plug it in, and see what happens. Also if anyone has better pictures of or can look at a japanese gimmick! cart pcb for me that would be very helpful. There's two capacitors at the top of the pcb, I want to know how many ufs and volts they are.

These caps:



The gimmick! cart audio circuit is completely reworked except for those caps values and which side of the 100k ohm resistor connects to which pin of the 5b (but there's only two possible spots so trial and error should do the trick). I'm pretty sure I have the eprom wiring all figured out. Now I'm just waiting on some eproms and resistors so I can build this thing (ordered them last night so this could take a while).

I'm more curious what the difference between the 5a and the fme7 is (the 5b is a bit obvious, it adds audio capability). I think the theory that the 5a is the earliest version is a good theory, which means the 5a could be identical to either the fme7 or the 5b. Without someone willing to convert a 5a cart to gimmick and wire up the audio pins we'll never know if the 5a has the audio capability or not.

Someone in the past made a Gimmick! repro using a 5A. There's no expansion audio.

lidnariq wrote:Someone in the past made a Gimmick! repro using a 5A. There's no expansion audio.

Thanks a lot for letting me know! Well guess I'm going to find out if the gremlins 2 5b can do it.

Gotta love the japanese:



http://applesorce.b.sourceforge.jp/2011 ... %e6%b3%95/

Sunsoft 5b pin 2, never expected that. I guess pin 18 has been voted off the island. 1 uf caps, who'da thunk. I found this by going into google images and typing in "sunsoft 5b". I was hoping to find a better picture of the gimmick pcb, not the entire schematic. With the limited japanese I can read, I think this schematic says pin 2 is vcc. I guess pin 8 is the third sound output but gimmick only uses 2 sound outputs, and vcc helps...uhm...amp them?

Drakon wrote:Sunsoft 5b pin 2, never expected that. I guess pin 18 has been voted off the island. 1 uf caps, who'da thunk. I found this by going into google images and typing in "sunsoft 5b". I was hoping to find a better picture of the gimmick pcb, not the entire schematic. With the limited japanese I can read, I think this schematic says pin 2 is vcc. I guess pin 8 is the third sound output but gimmick only uses 2 sound outputs, and vcc helps...uhm...amp them?

It sure looks like he's using pin 2 there. And it definitely cannot be Vcc after the modification is done. And on the FME-7 pin 2 is PRG A18, not Vcc, which is a different kind of awful.
It is conceivable that pin 2 is the input to the amplifier, and it's tied to vcc to keep it from oscillating wildly. Given that he lifted the pins with some tape, that's conceivable.

The amplifier has got to be an inverter of some sort; the capacitors are clearly DC blockers.

... Oh, hey, he's got a very high resolution picture of the GRM-E301 PCB without ROMs in the way, I think I'm going to trace it.

lidnariq wrote:It sure looks like he's using pin 2 there. And it definitely cannot be Vcc after the modification is done. And on the FME-7 pin 2 is PRG A18, not Vcc, which is a different kind of awful.
It is conceivable that pin 2 is the input to the amplifier, and it's tied to vcc to keep it from oscillating wildly. Given that he lifted the pins with some tape, that's conceivable.

The amplifier has got to be an inverter of some sort; the capacitors are clearly DC blockers.

... Oh, hey, he's got a very high resolution picture of the GRM-E301 PCB without ROMs in the way, I think I'm going to trace it.

Wait a minute...I need to lift my 5b pins?

Here's another random famicom cart that usually has a fme7 but possibly can come with a 5b:

http://rockn69.blog54.fc2.com/blog-entry-565.html

Honoo no Tokyuji Dodge Danpei

Drakon wrote:Wait a minute...I need to lift my 5b pins?

Have you a multimeter? Just test to see if pins 2 and 3 are connected to anything (especially ground and vcc) while it's off. If they're not, then you won't.
I'll get you a stronger answer after I've traced his photos.

Since we think pins 2 and 3 are an amplifier, you might be able to just skip that part of the schematic altogether and route the mixed audio back into the NES—but it might be too quiet. Or maybe you could use an external amplifier that's not part of the 5b.

lidnariq wrote:

Drakon wrote:Wait a minute...I need to lift my 5b pins?

Have you a multimeter? Just test to see if pins 2 and 3 are connected to anything (especially ground and vcc) while it's off. If they're not, then you won't.
I'll get you a stronger answer after I've traced his photos.

Since we think pins 2 and 3 are an amplifier, you might be able to just skip that part of the schematic altogether and route the mixed audio back into the NES—but it might be too quiet. Or maybe you could use an external amplifier that's not part of the 5b.

Yeah I'll probe it later. Check it out...the batman sunsoft 5b cart:

lidnariq wrote:I'll get you a stronger answer after I've traced his photos.

Well, I can confirm that pins 1, 4-17, 19-23, and 33-44 are identical between the 5B and the FME7. 24-26 & 28 are very likely the same too.